The Rod Martin Report – September 2, 2017

Hurricane Harvey, Katrina, and Global Warming “Superstorms”
The State Church of the Left
Rapidly Growing Leftist Violence
SPLC, Google and RICO
Trump Victories, Dem Defeats
The Truth about VJ Day and “Indigenous Peoples Day”
Why Labor Day in America is Not May Day

Dear Friends,

After some time off (from the Rod Martin Report, not from our weekly “Rod Martin LIVE!” on Facebook, the many other things we publish daily, or of course our growing companies), it’s good to be back with you!

As with every week in the Trump era, there’s simply more to talk about than we can cover.

But let’s give it a go.

Due to Hurricane Harvey, this has been a terrible week for millions of people in Texas, Louisiana and a growing number of other states. Before we kick off today’s report, let’s pause for a minute and remember them in prayer.

There are many ways you can help, but my personal favorite is Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, which annually mobilizes more volunteers for such service than any other organization in America except the Red Cross and the Salvation Army. You can help by clicking here.

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In our “news you never thought you’d hear” category, albeit in typical leftist “ never let a crisis go to waste” fashion, Democrat groups are attacking the Red Cross today. Why? Because rather than giving to aid an organization that has already sheltered more than 32,000 people in the Houston area alone, Democrats want you to give to their new “effort”, composed of leftist public sector unions and pro-open borders groups, that has sheltered precisely no one.

Oh, that and they’re the “Red Cross” rather than the “Red Fist” or the “Red Hammer and Sickle”.

According to Michelle Tremillo, head of a group that fights voter ID laws and supports sanctuary city legislation that would receive a large part of this “disaster relief” money, “We will make a determination about which relief efforts in particular to dedicate this funding after the floods recede.”

Yeah, after. Which is to say, they want you to avoid helping anyone now so they can help themselves later.

Count Michelle Tremillo our RMR Villain of the Week.

*******

Hurricane Harvey has been especially vexing to the Enemedia and to Democrats (but I repeat myself) because the Federal response has been so effective. Indeed, most Americans give FEMA high marks, up from just 29% in 2008, three years after Katrina.

So what’s a leftist to do? Attack the First Lady’s shoes.

No kidding, folks: this turned out to be a multi-day news story across all media. Melania Trump is so heartless and brazen that she actually boarded Air Force One wearing heels! Marie Antoinette!

And it’s true:

Of course, so is this, a couple hours later when she deplaned in Houston:

We have genuinely reached the point at which Mike Huckabee says that if the Trumps walked on water, the next day’s headline would read “First Family Can’t Swim”.

Who says progressives don’t believe in religion? They may not believe in Jehovah or Jesus, but they certainly believe in Old Testament-style wrath against sinners. Real Noah and the Ark stuff. This has happened even faster than usual, perhaps because the Katrina II scenario of emergency mismanagement didn’t pan out. So our friends on the left have had to look elsewhere to score ideological points, and they believe they’ve found the right target in the political economy of those greedy Texans. Specifically, Houston is a global hub of the oil and gas industry, and it has allowed “laissez-faire” development without zoning laws. This has brought the righteous wrath of Harvey down on their own heads.

Imagine the spectacle of abuse any pastor would suffer if he said something remotely similar. The left does surely have a religion – as we described in this week’s “The State Church of the Left” – and every day brings us just a tad closer to its homegrown Inquisition.

But a key part of that faith is that George W. Bush-induced “superstorms” (such as “Superstorm Sandy”, which wasn’t even a hurricane when it made landfall) are wreaking havoc at an ever-increasing rate because Republicans just don’t care.

Never mind that it’s been 12 long years since a major hurricane has made landfall in the United States, 13 since my own home was destroyed by one. That’s the longest U.S. hurricane drought since 1869. Global Warming, er, Climate Change is causing superstorms! And if you don’t say so, you are worse than Hitler!

“Harvey is what climate change looks like,” Eric Holthaus, meteorologist and climate activist declared Tuesday. Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project, which claims without regard for reality that every year since Katrina has been hotter than the last, opined that “climate change makes hurricanes more devastating,” while 350.org announced that Harvey is “an unnatural disaster”, “the product of both a hotter planet and this administration’s climate denial, racism and callousness.”

Wow. Who knew the President had such superhuman powers? Apparently Mother Earth is losing to a guy they were just calling a clown.

McAuliffe – and even Nancy Pelosi – felt the need to (belatedly) condemn leftist violence because nearly all the political violence in America is leftwing, primarily brought to you by Antifa, the “anti-fascist” American brown shirts. Ringleaders like McAuliffe and Pelosi, who benefit immensely from that violence, need distance from it.

But it is exactly what they were seeking when – after screeching throughout October that anyone who questioned the outcome of the election was “threatening democracy” – they then labeled the surprise winner illegitimate and a Nazi, and called all decent people to “resist”.

If someone asks you to stop Hitler, what are you going to do, right?

To define Trump as Hitler, he has to be a racist, which of course he is not, but which fits the longstanding Democrat narrative for all Republicans whatsoever. He also has to be violent, which also makes sense because the American political party which has spawned murderous racist terror wings at home – the Ku Klux Klan, the Weather Underground, the Black Panthers – and supported them abroad – the Provisional IRA – has always been the Republican Party. Right?

It actually doesn’t matter who the fascists are, if only one side gets to decide.

That one side is personified in a very specific group. The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) has for many years now maintained a ” hate map” and a ” hate list” identifying what they “objectively” determine to be all of America’s “hate groups”.

Some of those groups actually are pretty terrible. The problem is, the list lumps them together with lots of legitimate groups the SPLC dislikes. The Family Research Council is on the list. So is the American Family Association. So is Dr. James Dobson. I kid you not.

Indeed, dozens of other conservative and Christian organizations (but no leftist ones, not even Antifa) are listed as “hate groups”, from Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy to legal defense funds like Liberty Counsel and Alliance Defending Freedom. Whether they oppose Sharia or terrorism or just believe in Christian orthodoxy, they are “hate groups” to the SPLC purely because they are opposed to the leftist agenda.

The new “hate-free” algorithm in development is a literal Orwellian memory hole. Remember Steve Scalise? Of course you do: he’s the House Majority Whip – one of the most prominent politicians on the planet – and he was nearly assassinated a few weeks ago by a Bernie Sanders-supporting leftwing terrorist. He’s going to get a few million hits on Google, right?

It’s easy enough to figure out the direction of this project by taking it for a test drive. A search for “Scalise” returned four results, one of which didn’t even mention Steve Scalise, the congressman who was shot by a crazed leftist in June. A search for “Trump” during the same time period yielded more than 200 results. A search of the raw data resulted in 1178 hits for Trump and not a single mention of Scalise.

There can’t be any “inconvenient truth” about who nearly murdered him if you can’t find him at all, huh? Indeed, if he ever becomes inconvenient in some other way (like opposing leftist legislation), it will be a lot easier to smear him if the only stories about him are the ones Google allows from the left.

But the SPLC is the least of their worries. Google may be at or close to the point of RICO violations. And at the very least, as draconian power over the First Amendment is increasingly concentrated in these hands, even conservatives may have to ask the question: will it become necessary to regulate Google, Facebook and others as public utilities?

Let us hope not.

*******

That all sounds pretty glass-half-empty, I know. But the glass is a lot more than half-full, not least because we finally have a Republican President who fights. And if the left is screeching like banshees, allowing us to see their true form, it’s because they know they’d nearly won it all and now are losing.

Trump’s tax reform plan is particularly disastrous for the Dems, not least because Congressional Republicans are actually behind it. The average American now spends more on taxes than on food and clothing combined: you can lay that at Obama’s feet, and no one has to be told so. But the far more potent point is that while reducing corporate income taxes to 15% will spark a wave of job creation and growth, reducing small business taxes – LLCs, S-corps, etc. – to that same 15% will be a de facto flat tax: everyone will find a way to become a small business owner, even if only as an independent contractor.

That’s a revolution. It will make everyone the sort of small business-owning entrepreneur or freeholder Jefferson and Lincoln imagined. It will upend statist employee-centric healthcare. It might just give America China-level GDP growth. And the world will marvel in our wake.

The Democrats know they have to nip this in the bud, or it will be the end of the racist “demography is destiny” strategy they’ve been pursuing for twenty-plus years. If illegal border crossings stop (and yes, they’re down 73% just since January 20, and yes, the wall is moving forward), who will provide the vote (fraud) margin needed to overcome the majority benefiting from all of this, or at least that’s sick of the left’s war on America?

No one, that’s who, as come what may, Democrats continue to abort their future and double down on failure.

Yes, the glass is a lot more than half-full. But just as it was a year before VJ Day, the war is still far from over.

*******

One last thing before we get to Labor Day. Two other holidays are worthy of note this week, both sufficient to make leftist heads pop (doesn’t everything now?): VJ Day and Columbus, er, “Indiginous Peoples” Day.

Victory over Japan would already bother plenty of today’s Social Justice Warriors – how dare America be so judgmental, after all, as to declare victory over another culture? – but of course, America also won that war with a bang: two of them, to be precise, one over Hiroshima demonstrating the capability and another over Nagasaki to prove we could continue as long as necessary.

The Japanese surrendered unconditionally shortly thereafter. They did so formally on September 2, 1945, 72 years ago today, on the deck of the USS Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.

Jack Wheeler does a characteristically masterful job of describing the how, but especially the why, of this in his 2010 piece “Runway Able”, a must-read. The atomic bombings easily saved something between eleven and twelve million lives, at significantly less damage and death toll than the conventional bombings of Hamburg or Tokyo. This is utterly lost on the SJWs, but must be remembered by grown-ups.

There’s nothing wrong, of course, with celebrating everyone’s cultural heritage: this is America, and we do a lot of that.

What is wrong is two-fold: the left’s continued Cultural Revolution, not at all unlike ISIS’s destruction of Palmyra or the Taliban’s blowing up the Buddhas of Bamiyan; and the diminution of one of the greatest men of all time, Christopher Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea.

Space does not permit doing justice to Columbus’ achievements. But suffice it to say, you wouldn’t be here had he not lived. And neither would many of the complaining “indigenous peoples”.

Why? Because if they were unfortunate enough to live under the supposedly magnificent Aztec “civilization”, they would probably be human sacrifices. If they lived in the Caribbean Basin, they would likely be enslaved or murdered if men, caged and raped if women, their offspring eaten by the captors.

Across the hemisphere, this is the sort of idyllic culture Western contact ended.

Even if we take the leftists accusations seriously, they are senseless. Did the Spanish practice slavery? Yes: so did the natives. Did the Spanish murder their enemies? Yes: and many of the natives killed their own people as well. Did the Spanish raid and conquer? The natives did little else.

Thus the question becomes whether one group did anything more praiseworthy than the other. And of course one did: one ended most of the other’s barbarity. And one expanded the bounds of human civilization forever.

Columbus had little to do with the former, but everything to do with the latter: it was his vision and his personal courage that ended the Middle Ages and created the modern world. Any “indigenous people” who enjoys human rights, modern medicine, a regular food supply and indoor plumbing should thank him daily.

The Los Angeles City Council has no interest in any of that,because in standard freeloader fashion, they benefit from Columbus’s legacy without cost to themselves. So in disgust at their endlessly calling good evil and evil good, Christopher Columbus is our RMR Hero of the Millennium.

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Finally, on Monday, and all this Labor Day weekend, America celebrates the working people who have always made America great.

It is worth noting that America does not celebrate – as more than 80 other countries and every Socialist and Communist Party on Earth do – May Day, the May 1st “International Workers’ Day”. It was President Grover Cleveland, all the way back in 1887, who put paid to that idea. Cleveland, and Congress, did not want Labor Day to become a federally-sanctioned endorsement of the proletarian revolution and the destruction of America. And so America celebrates its workers in September.

Socialism sees workers as cogs in a machine, and the state (or the party) as their vanguard and savior. America has always taken a very different view. Though there is honor in honest work, no matter for whom you work, America has always encouraged individual independence. Jefferson dreamed of an “empire of liberty” and a “nation of freeholders”: entrepreneurs – small business owners – in an era when the primary small business available – and almost exclusively available in America – was a farm.

Lincoln doubled down on this vision, first through the Pacific Railroad Acts enabling the infrastructure to knit together the continent, and second through the Homestead Act, which gave 160 acres to anyone from anywhere who would actually settle and work that land for seven years (no absentee landlords allowed). The rallying cry of the new Republican Party was “ Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men”, and its intent was simple: a nation of entrepreneurs who each owned a stake in the system, as the destruction not merely of slavery but of the de facto aristocracy slavery entails.

Labor Day is not May Day. Labor Day celebrates not just the workingman but the right to work as you please, for whom you please, where and when you please. It was Jefferson’s and Lincoln’s visions that populated the entire continent, with people who manifestly did not want to work for whomever they were then working. Their adventurous and herculean spirit created the greatest nation of Earth, and continues to outpace all comers, even in an age when many are beguiled by the shackles of the left.

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For Freedom,

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